Text-Only Version
Jump to: Technical Note
About the Collection
The First Volume (1728) [Frontispiece]
Ephraim Chambers' acclaimed eighteenth-century classic, Cyclopaedia, or, An universal dictionary of arts and sciences, in two volumes, appeared in 1728. The Supplement, also in two volumes, followed in 1753.
Noteworthy features of this distinguished work, the first edition, include the use of cross-references; the Dedication to the King, George II, and the compiler's "Plan of the Work," within the prefatory section, volume one.
Robert Lewis Collison reminds us that Chambers attained the distinction of "father of the modern encylopaedia throughout the world." (Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout the Ages, 2d ed., p.103, Hafner, New York & London, 1966.)
The four volumes of the set are held in the Special Collections Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Scholars and others who study the envcyclopaedia and/or the dictionary, the social sciences, the physical and natural sciences, and the humanities, including the book arts, will potentially find research interest. The Cyclopaedia is held in the Special Collections Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Technical Note
Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):
- Hand-written texts;
- Texts that contain diacritics;
- Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
- Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
- Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.
Top of Page